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Friday 7 September 2007

Neighbours

I have moved!!! Hurrah hurrah let joy be unconfined. I am now the proud owner of a beautiful house and a collection of insane furniture gathered from various family members. I am still a little nervous about sitting on the kitchen chairs. I can clearly remember Grandma falling through one of the chairs. She died soon afterwards. Now I’m not saying the two are related but it’s not a chance I’m willing to take. Either way, death chairs aside, I’m loving it. I was particularly delighted to unpack the box of receipts I’d packed 4 months ago. Thank god those babies are safe! Nothing says welcome to a new home like a receipt book for a fridge you hired in Sydney five years ago. It’s now carefully stored in a drawer. It’s a vicious circle.

However the nicest thing of all is that there doesn’t seem to be any insane neighbours. The relief of coming home and not having to talk to a care in the community patient is enormous. When I was a student we lived above someone with “issues”. Given the smell in the corridor he was controlling (or causing) these issues with “herbal medicine” and so we mainly left him alone. He did however like to write us notes apologising for his actions. These mainly read “I am sorry for banging a door loudly at midnight last night. I am punishing myself”. Next note: “I am sorry for putting a note through your door at 3am yesterday morning. It was wrong and I am punishing myself”. Our mature response was to call him Dobby (the self punishing elf in Harry Potter) and ignore him. He did point out to us that we should be more grateful to him as he was “protecting our bin”, but we didn’t really have that strong feelings towards our bin so we let him get on with it.

When I lived in Sydney my upstairs neighbours weren’t too bad except they seemed to have a roller disco at 6am every Sunday morning. Or they were training their kids for the Olympics by making them do laps of the flat. Back in the UK one set of neighbours used their house as storage and lived in a caravan park a mile or so away (I have no idea what that was about).

Then there were the neighbours who enjoyed their techno discos at 3pm every day and then after they mysteriously disappeared one day they were replaced by a sweet old man who liked easy listening music. At 7am on a Saturday. There’s nothing like being jolted awake by “Annie’s Song” or “Leaving on a Jet Plane”. It was like having Peter, Paul and Mary in bed with you. My flatmate snapped one day and went downstairs and asked him to turn this particular rendition of “Annie’s Song” down. His reply was that he was sorry but he was a music man. Julie replied “Yeah, I’ve noticed, you like this and ‘Leaving on a jet plane’.” The reply was a line that is guaranteed to stop any argument dead and has made me determined never to row with the neighbours again.

“Yes, I like that song. You see I lost my wife on a jet plane”

Oh OK. Well you enjoy blasting that out. But anyway. I intend to keep myself to myself. No disco’s, no folk rock, no demanding rewards for looking after people’s bins. I am turning the nutter magnet off. I shall ignore them all. Unless of course they are interested in seeing my receipt collection.

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